How does the forum count thread views?

[Inactive01 5,299]

I've always wondered... how exactly does the thread views ticker work? You know, the statistic that says how many views a thread has received. I'm also asking this in terms of profile views.

[Nohbdy 4,108]

The counter has a delay in updating the number of views. This seems to apply for both threads and profiles, and probably works the same way for blogs. 
 
From what I can tell, this is beneficial to the board's performance. Since there are so many views going on at once, updating them at different times can lessen the load on the server. 
 
I also did a quick search on the Internet. This thread, on Invision Power's site, gives a good idea of what's going on. 
 

There is an option to have the views updated periodically instead of instantly. It's primarily for very busy boards and helps to increase efficiency by just making a quick save of the topic number (nothing else, just the topic number) to a table. When it's all updated, the topics are counted up and that total is added to the view counter for that topic. So it's nothing wrong and in fact can help the performance, speed and reliability of a board.